Godard on Trailers

Movie trailers, in today's internet centric movie climate, have almost replaced movies. Needless to say, this is a sorry state of affairs and I am a textbook example of the problem. Trailers can, at best, give you a sense of the plot, atmosphere, and visuals of a film. At worst they can make a good movie look bad and make a bad movie look good. Its certainly not the most reliable way to judge a movie's potential quality. More reliable measures include sticking with known artists (generally directors) of a certain level of skill and reading reviews. Sure, there's the easy argument that in a country where more than 650 movies are released each year, deciding what to see in your limited time is the most important and most difficult part of being serious about movies, and one of the best ways to decide is to watch trailers. The first part of that is pretty undeniable, not seeing everything you'd like to is par for the course. The second part, though, is a serious fallacy that seems solid when its floating around, unexamined, in the subconscious but has all sorts of problems when its really examined. Plus, watching trailers is, at first, quality control but quickly devolves into being a substitute for the movie (to be fair, this is sometimes warranted -- take the trailer for Letters to Juliet which IS the movie). So, it seems particularly fitting that the latest Jean-Luc Godard trailer IS his latest film, sped up to fit into about 4 minutes. The Coen brothers hinted at this sort of irreverence with the trailer to their last film, A Serious Man, but didn't quite reach the heights of this latest bit of genius from one of the great film artists: